Trump in ‘full sprint’ to close Biden’s cash lead
Donald Trump is in a “full sprint” to narrow President Joe Biden’s substantial fundraising advantage.
Trump’s team is aware that it is behind and wants to catch up quickly, according to a source familiar with Republican fundraising.
Republican officials are eager to narrow the gap so they can compete with Biden’s campaign, but Trump’s legal woes are placing a strain ontheir efforts.
A weekend dinner in Palm Beach is expected to raise about US$50 million (NZ$83m), people close to Trump said. The former president is understood to have told donors ahead of the event that it would bring in double the US$25m Democrats said they raised during a recent New York fundraiser with Biden and former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
The Trump campaign and Republican National Committee said this week that they raised more than US$65.6m in March and ended the month with about US$93m on hand, a dramatic improvement over its February results.
But Trump’s fundraising machine remains far behind Biden’s, which had an earlier start in fundraising from wealthy donors through shared accounts with national and state parties. Biden brought in more than US$90m in March. The broader Biden effort ended the month with $192m in cash on hand, more than double what Trump controlled.
Trump is closely tracking who is attending the Palm Beach fundraiser, who has given the maximum and how much has been raised, according to a person who spoke to him recently.
Biden’s team said it was not worried about Trump’s event.
“This thing this weekend is a handful of billionaires figuring out how to pay his legal bills, and we’ve got millions of grass-roots donors who are powering our campaign,” said Rob Flaherty, a Biden deputy campaign manager. The Biden campaign now finds itself well ahead of where Obama’s reelection effort was at the same point in 2012.
Trump’s campaign finance reports in recent months have shown the tremendous strain that his legal troubles are placing on his broader fundraising effort. Reports filed in January showed that two of Trump’s committees, the Save America leadership PAC and the Make America Great Again PAC, spent $55.6m on legal bills in 2023 as Trump fights felony charges in four criminal cases.